Corporate Greed
Blog Posts
We all know that working for Walmart is no picnic. It pays low wages, slashes hours, offers little or no job security, exploits and intimidates workers and uses sweatshop labor. That’s why Walmart workers are on strike this week, to protest the corporation’s greedy behavior and shady business practices.
Learn more about the strike here
.
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Declaring that a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Kathy Surratt-States amounted to “curb service” for Patriot Coal, Cecil Roberts, president of the Mine Workers (
UMWA
), told a crowd of more than 4,000 gathered here that the union will never stop its campaign for justice for miners and retirees abandoned by Patriot and its creators, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal.
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The money that hasn’t been going into workers’ paychecks while wages have stagnated for decades has been found. It’s been diverted to corporate profits and,
according to a new study
, that money was rerouted because of a decline in union membership—not the technology and computerization that’s boosted productivity and eliminated jobs.
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On Wednesday, Judge Kathy Surratt-States of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri
ruled in favor of Patriot Coal
in its efforts to eliminate its collective bargaining agreements and get out of commitments made to retirees who worked for Patriot, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. These workers gave years of their lives to making the companies profitable only to be abandoned in their retirement years. The Mine Workers (
UMWA
) union continues to argue that Patriot was specifically
designed to fail
in order to dump retiree health care costs. The current CEO of Patriot, Ben Hatfield,
agreed with that assessment
.
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Last week
, in an effort to pursue long-delayed justice, three of America's largest law firms filed lawsuits against Signal International on behalf of many of these men, and at least five more major law firms have agreed to represent many more. In an unprecedented
pro bono
collaboration, the firms will collectively represent more than 200 former guest workers in these suits, which charge that the men were subjected to forced labor and fraud that rose to the level of racketeering and human trafficking.
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A
New York Times editorial
this weekend criticizes Republican obstructionism designed to stop the National Labor Relations Board from protecting workers' rights by blocking President Obama's appointments to the board.
On a more global scale, similar opposition to unions is contributing to a business climate that allows tragedies like the recent deaths of 1,100 factory workers in Bangladesh to happen. In
The Washington Post
, Lance Compa argues that a stronger labor movement in the countries that build the products sold by multinational corporations like Walmart, Apple and many others would go a long way to improving worker safety and working conditions.
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Apple (like many giant, multinational corporations) has been avoiding paying the taxes they owe to the country by setting up foreign “subsidiaries” in tax-haven countries and moving jobs and profit centers out of the country. They have accumulated billions upon billions of dollars in these tax havens. Now they want a special tax break to reward them for doing that.
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Followers of the Rootstrikers movement, which is dedicated to getting money out of politics across the country, are taking action on Sunday, May 19, to expose corporate spending in politics. The plan is for activists to head to grocery stores, department stores and shopping malls and use the
BizVizz
mobile app to help get out the word that some of the most popular products sold in those stores are made by companies that pour millions of dollars into buying elected officials.
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Last week, Walmart said it would speed up its plan to hire returning military veterans that it had
announced in January
. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Walmart’s latest move “is more about public relations than honoring our heroes.”
We owe it to our returning veterans to make sure they are treated as the heroes they are, rather than as symbols used to ‘greenwash’ Walmart’s eroding brand. After facing enemies abroad, is an $8.81 an hour part-time job the best we can offer returning veterans?
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A
new report
from the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future shows that the CEOs who run the 90 corporations in the '"Fix the Debt" coalition, which advocates for cuts to earned benefits like Social Security while reducing tax rates for, well, themselves, accept massive subsidies from the U.S. government. The amount they have taken in subsidies ranges from a possible low of $953 million to a possible high of $1.6 billion. The AFL-CIO's
Executive PayWatch
covers related issues.
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